Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft [Hardcover]

Lyndall Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2005

The founder of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the most famous woman of her era. A brilliant, unconventional rebel vilified for her strikingly modern notions of education, family, work, and personal relationships, she nevertheless strongly influenced political philosophy in Europe and a newborn America. Now acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon mounts a spirited defense of this courageous woman whose reputation has suffered over the years by painting a full and vibrant portrait of an extraordinary historical figure who was generations ahead of her time.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. With Gordon, the life of the "famous, then notorious" Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is in the hands of a scholarly admirer and defender, a distinguished biographer (of T. S. Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and others) as interested in Wollstonecraft for her mistakes as for her triumphs. For those familiar with the broad outlines of Wollstonecraft's personal life (her friendships with Jane Arden and Fanny Blood, her relationship with the painter Fuseli, her affair with Gilbert Imlay, her "friendship melting into love" with the philosopher Godwin), Gordon offers fresh detail and insight. She brings encyclopedic scope to her construction of a very British life deeply affected by tumultuous events in America and France. "She was not a born genius," Gordon says, "she became one," and Gordon succeeds admirably in showing readers how this independent, compassionate woman who devised a blueprint for human change achieved that distinction. Wollstonecraft's wide, evolving circles of friends, benefactors, mentors, admirers and detractors is richly sketched. Melodrama (a money-squandering, abusive father; a sister trapped in a tyrannical marriage; financial crises; unfaithful lovers; attempted suicides) abounds. Wollstonecraft's life was an adventurous one; in Paris, she watched as the admired French Revolution become the Reign of Terror. Yet Wollstonecraft's adventurous life illuminates rather than obscures the philosophical and historical work that made her the foremother of much modern thinking about education and human rights, as well as about women's rights, female sexuality and the institution of marriage. Deeply documented with Wollstonecraft's writing, contemporary memoirs, letters and archival materials, Gordon's biography is eminently readable and rewarding. Photos.
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From Booklist

Acclaimed biographer Gordon (of Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James) puts a new spin on the unconventional ideas and lifestyle of eighteenth-century feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft. A woman of her time, strongly influenced by the domestic violence she witnessed as a child and by the heady political events of her day, she was able to rise above the social customs and constraints that dictated that women had limited opportunities outside the arena of marriage. Forced by necessity and desire to make her own way, she was determined to carve out a career for herself as a writer. Condemned for her lifestyle choices, which included a series of well--publicized love affairs and out-of-wedlock children, she thumbed her nose at societal conventions, advocating the sexual and political liberation of women in her landmark Vindication of the Rights of Women. Rather than a sensationalized approach to his infamous subject, Gordon opts for a more intellectually rooted approach, focusing on the impact of the American Revolution and Enlightenment thought on the philosophical development of a remarkable groundbreaker. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Harper (May 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060198028
• ISBN-13: 978-0060198022
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,688,410 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Illumination, June 14, 2005

By 

rctnyc (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Hardcover)

Lyndall Gordon's marvellous, insightful biography presents the reader with a many-layered, intellectualy committed, morally-centered Wollstonecroft who triumphed over the stereotypes of her day -- albeit perhaps not over the prejudices of her early biographers -- by virtue of her originality, passion and resiliance. She depicts Wollstonecroft as a searcher and teacher who sought to define a role for women that included men and was founded on an appreciation of domesticity and motherhood and an abhorrance of violence. This Wollstonecroft experienced the French Revolution, not merely as an intellectual, but as a human being who was repelled by the violence and irrationality of the terror even as she became caught up in her own personal drama of romance, childbirth and rejection. Many writers, including those in her own time, depicted Wollstonecroft as an idealist whose practice fell short of her principles. Gordon illuminates those principles and shows that an appreciation of humanity, emotion and the importance of empathy was always central to Wollstonecroft's thought and that, if she fell short at times, she had the intelligence, determination and insight to recover. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this biography, including the sections describing Wollstonecroft's journey to Norway on behalf of Gilbert Imlay, a central event in Wollstonecroft's life that brought together many of the themes -- courage,devotion, originality, tenacity, the transformation of personal experience into art (her travel book) -- that resonate through Mary Wollstonecroft's life and define her legacy.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Too much, too little, but enough, June 10, 2005

By 

N. McCabe - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Hardcover)

Take an avant-garde feminist, teacher, polemicist, child care advisor, grandmother - so to speak - of "Frankenstein", flouter of social convention, twice-failed suicidee, with wit worthy of a snooty Paris salon. Now make her tale as dry as the inventory in an annual audit. Can you do that? Lyndall Gordon can. Gordon shows all, but illuminates little. Her forte is detail with a whiff of sentiment, not the dance of ideas nor subtleties of context. MW clashed with Burke about the revolution in France, but that report passes quickly in favor of repetitious opinions about MW's sisters or students. We hear about MW's personal dread at dark prole forms outside her Paris home, but little about her reaction to the Jacobin silencing of French feminists. We wander on an agonizing search for a silver ship - it rivals Geraldo's opening of Al Capone's vault for its empty ending. Still, Gordon's inventory can please; suggesting enjoyable lines of inquiry for an engaged reader. With the growth of literacy, all of the worthies were publishing. Was MW the star of some 18th century proto-blogosphere? Why did such an independent woman (and fierce mother) throw herself into the Thames because of a man? What commends her to us still? Surely not just her willingness to face scandal openly, Paris Hilton with a tongue that stings. Other women taught or wrote; what energy of desire made MW sui generis? In the end, Gordon's book is accounting, good accounting - hard data to run down intriguing questions that Wollstonecraft's life proffers.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing account of a great life, December 24, 2005

By 

JoL (NY, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (Hardcover)

This book is not the place to begin if you are not already convinced of Mary Wollstonecraft's genius. I began reading to find the author referring to Wollstonecraft as a genius without any preface for this claim. I was immediately thrown out of the narrative by this assumption. The author describes each of the books that Wollstonecraft wrote without bothering to asses their merit for the reader, are we to take for granted that they were great literary works? I found this lack of any sort of judgment of the subject strange. The book similarly failed to engage me in the narrative. The author leaves her subject for long discussions of the history of the family that she was a governess for. This subject did not have enough baring on Wollstonecraft's life to make it worth including. That such a unique and groundbreaking woman should have her life reduced to so dull a narrative, with so many assumption about her life disappointed me. The book itself failed to hold my interest.